http://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/issue/feedSign Systems Studies2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Kalevi Kullsss@ut.eeOpen Journal Systems<div id="text_index">An international journal of semiotics and sign processes in culture and living nature.</div><br /><div>The journal <em>Sign Systems Studies</em> was established in 1964 by Juri Lotman (initially as Труды по знаковым системам - Σημειωτικη), and is thus the oldest international semiotic periodical. Originally (until 1992) a Russian-language series, it is now published in English, and has become a central institution in the semiotics of culture.</div><div><br />Starting from 1998, Sign Systems Studies is published as an international peer-reviewed journal on the semiotics of culture and nature. Issued regularly, one volume per year, it is indexed in major scientific databases. Since 2009, each volume includes four issues.</div><br /><div>Periodicity: one volume (four issues) per year.</div><div>Official languages: English and Russian, Estonian for abstracts.<br /><br /></div><div><table width="535" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td><table width="535" cellspacing="9"><tbody><tr><td><div id="text_editors">Editors: <br /> Kalevi Kull, Peeter Torop, Mihhail Lotman, <br /> Timo Maran, Silvi Salupere, Ene-Reet Soovik, Remo Gramigna</div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr valign="top"><td><table width="535" border="0" cellspacing="5" cellpadding="5"><tbody><tr><td width="250"><br /><div id="text_editors">Editorial board:</div><div id="text_ed_board">Myrdene Anderson (Purdue, USA)<br /> Paul Cobley (London, UK)<br /> Marcel Danesi (Toronto, Canada)<br /> John Deely ✝ (Houston, USA)<br /> Umberto Eco <span>✝</span> (Bologna, Italy)<br /> Vyacheslav V. Ivanov (LA, USA, <br /> and Moscow, Russia)<br /> Gunther Kress (London, UK)<br /> Julia Kristeva (Paris, France)</div></td><td width="250"><div id="text_ed_board"><br />Jesper Hoffmeyer (Copenhagen, Denmark)<br />Roland Posner (Berlin, Germany) <br />Frederik Stjernfelt (Aarhus, Denmark)<br />Eero Tarasti (Helsinki, Finland)<br />Winfried Nöth (Kassel, Germany,<br /> and Sao Paulo, Brazil)<br />Boris Uspenskij (Napoli, Italy)<br />Jaan Valsiner (Worcester, USA)</div></td></tr><tr><td valign="top"><div id="text_ed_board"><br /><br />Published by <img src="/public/site/images/ivovolt/UTP-2016.jpg" alt="" height="70" /></div></td><td><div id="text_ed_board"><br />PRINT ISSN 1406-4243</div><div>ONLINE ISSN 1736-7409</div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></div><hr />http://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.01A. J. Greimas: The perfection of imperfection2017-07-05T17:13:56+03:00Andrius Grigorjevasandrius.grigorjevas@gmail.comRemo Gramignagramigna@ut.eeSilvi Saluperesilvi.salupere@ut.eeA. J. Greimas: The perfection of imperfection2017-06-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.02Relationalism: From Greimas to hyperstructuralism2017-07-05T17:13:56+03:00Franciscu Seddafsedda@unica.itThe emergence of New Realism in philosophy and the Ontological Turn in anthropology testify to the increasing attention paid in the human sciences to the topic of ‘reality’. The aim of this essay is to reread and translate Greimas’ proposal of a <em>semiotic of the natural world</em>, so as to suggest how his concepts might contribute to the contemporary intellectual debate. From a discussion of Greimas’ attempt to solve the problem of the relation between ‘language’ and ‘world’ in <em>nonreferentialist</em> terms, the essay will then move to identify the four forms of correlation that constitute natures and worlds, objects and subjects. In bringing his argument to the extreme consequences, I will call for a reevaluation of structuralism, and propose to distinguish ‘reality’ from ‘the real’. Both hypotheses rest on the idea that <em>relations</em> are the matter we are made of.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.03The semiotics of A. J. Greimas: A European intellectual heritage seen from the inside and the outside2017-07-05T17:13:56+03:00Eero Tarastieero.tarasti@helsinki.fiThe essay deals with the formation of the Greimassian thought from its earliest origins in his young years at Kaunas University, i.e. his connections with Wilhelm Sesemann, Lev Karsavin and Russian formalism, to the rise of structuralism in Paris. The Paris School approach stems from <em>Sémantique structurale</em> (1967) leading to the ‘third semiotic revolution’, as Greimas called it, by the invention of the modalities. This made his method close to even analytic philosophy and modal logics. In both, a linguistic turn and use of formal logics took place. Yet Greimas’ semiotics grew out of a purely linguistic framework into a broader philosophical approach. Nowadays, considered one of the classics of the semiotic scene, his method still has not lost anything of its analytic acuity and epistemic temptation. Even such new paradigms as existential semiotics grow organically from some Greimas’ ideas which have kept their relevance.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.04Praxis and enunciation: Greimas, heir of Saussure2017-07-05T17:13:56+03:00Jacques Fontanillejacques.fontanille@unilim.fr<p>Enunciative praxis was defined as comprising all the operations that produce, through assuming the system of narrative deep structures, semiotic configurations sufficiently stabilized to be available for other uses. The practice of enunciation implies an operations chain, organized in collective time, and a capacity for creation and renewal in meaning figures production, under the constraint of cultural conditions.</p><p>This conception of enunciation is not an invention of Greimassian semiotics in general. It is present already in Saussure, when he describes signs praxis and life of languages. The founding moment of his reasoning is the substitution of substance by action: the sign is not an abstraction obtained by discretization of the substance, the sign is a “class of executions”, a praxeological class.</p><p>The Greimassian enunciative praxis can be defined as all acts by which discourses are convoked, selected, handled and invented by each particular enunciation. This conception strengthens the relationship with Saussure’s speaking mass, since the praxis in question belongs to no one, and it is not even assignable to a precise linguistic community.</p><p>Finally, we may propose to analyse enunciation praxis as a sequence of <em>reflection</em> and <em>exploration</em>, which mediates between primary experience and the semiotic object.</p>2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.05The clash of semiotic civilizations2017-07-05T17:13:56+03:00Massimo Leonemassimo.leone@unito.itWhy was Greimas’ theoretical proposal so divisive? Why did his disciples worship the new analytical method, while his detractors harshly rejected it? The article claims that the strength, as well as the weakness, of Greimassian semiotics consists in positing a rational way to determine the range of meanings of a text. Semiotic interpretive methods that are more aware of the diachronic dimension, such as Eco’s interpretive semiotics or Lotman’s semiotics of culture, inflect this view by anchoring the rationality of interpretation to the reasonableness of a community of interpreters that is, by definition, changing over time. The article claims that, on the one hand, Greimas’ theoretical stance is in line with the predominant ‘culture of meaning’ distilled by the Western civilization from the Greeks until the Enlightenment, stressing the value of truth as correspondence between textual evidence and its hermeneutics. On the other hand, the article also suggests that Eco’s and Lotman’s insistence on the dynamic character of hermeneutic communities entails a politics of meaning meant to preserve the core of the Western ‘semiotic civilization’ against threats that aim at deeply subverting it from both the inside or the outside of the semiosphere.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.06Signs and figures: Some remarks about Greimas’ theory of the figurative2017-07-05T17:13:56+03:00Paolo Bertettibertetti@unisi.itThe paper is a first attempt to analyse Greimas’ theory of the figurative from a “philological” perspective and discuss some hitherto unresolved issues. In particular, the paper will focus on four main topics: (1) the relation with Hjelmslev’s conception of the figure, showing that while Greimas’ conception of the figure is closely related to that of Hjelmslev’s – mainly in the fact that the figure is placed below the sign – it does, however, possess quite different and peculiar features; (2) the problem of the significant nature of figures, that emerges in many writings of Greimas’ and those of his followers, in which figures are not considered elements of the content that are smaller than a sign, with no autonomous meaning, but as already significant entities; (3) the problematic distinction between the thematic and the figurative; (4) the nature and limits of a semiotics of the sensible, and the (im)possibility of redefining and studying figurativity, not as given in a text, but when first grasped at the moment of perception.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.07A. J. Greimas’ historical lexicology (1945–1958) and the place of the lexeme in his work2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Thomas F. Brodenbroden@purdue.eduIn his first research project, Greimas developed and applied new methods in the historical lexicology of modern French. His theoretical articles formulate a sociological approach that analyses vocabulary as a history of culture, illustrated in his two dissertations on fashion in 1830. In the 1980s, from the perspective of his semiotics, Greimas dismissed his early scholarship as failed experiments that taught him what not to do. In the changed epistemological context of the 21st century, the work appears as pioneering research in cultural studies which possesses clear scholarly value. Greimas’ philological and lexicological training bore fruit directly and indirectly throughout his career. Two decades before he launched his semiotics, his project for lexicology proposes a semantic methodology, envisions the construction of an organon for the human sciences, and explicitly calls for a multi-generational collaborative enterprise. Like his structural semantics and semiotics, this lexicology entails three inseparable components: epistemological foundations, concrete methodologies, and robust applications. Moreover, a focus on the lexeme characterizes Greimas’ structural semantics and persists in his semiotics.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.08The impossibility of immanence: A contemporary perspective on Algirdas Julius Greimas’ <i>Maupassant</i>2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Dalia Satkauskytėsatkauskyte@yahoo.comThe book <em>Maupassant</em> (1976), which is devoted to an analysis of Maupassant’s short story “Two friends”, is one of A. J. Greimas’ most important works. In it he tried out the semiotic tools he had developed up to that point, tested models for narrative analysis, and anticipated future perspectives in the development of semiotic theory. We discuss how the book puts forward the principle of immanent analysis, and how the “closed” text – the object of semiotic analysis – is constructed. The article reveals that while Greimas declares, in the book’s Foreword, that he is distancing from context – the literary sociocultural universe – within the analysis itself he is forced to recognize certain contextual elements. Greimas recognizes the importance of acknowledging contextual facts such as the French concept of <em>patrie</em> and does not attempt to hide certain subjective interpretive elements. Yet at the same time Greimas attempts to suppress context’s invasion of his interpretation. He recognizes the semantic isotopies generated by context to the extent to which they suit the coherence of his analysis, considering them auxiliary in terms of the syntactic and discursive structures of the text. Nevertheless, a contextual isotopy – based on intertextual ties to a Biblical parable – becomes the main one. We come to the conclusion that the principle of immanence in <em>Maupassant</em> is not a negation, but a problematization that demonstrates how relevant contextual material can be integrated into a semiotic analysis.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.09Methodological issues and prospects of semiotics of humour2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Dmitrij Gluscevskijdmitrij.gluscevskij@yahoo.comThis article aims at proposing a way to identify humour by means of Greimassian semiotics and to single humour out as a unique object of semiotic analysis. Firstly, the article discusses the fundamental epistemological premises of semiotic text analysis through the analysis of texts by Greimas which were meant to further and legitimize his project of semiotics. Also, the already existing attempts at providing a semiotic definition of humour are critically evaluated while relating their problematic aspects with the implicitly defined field of semiotic interest. Finally, it is demonstrated that a productive semiotic description of a comic text is possible when the <em>status quo</em> epistemological views are revised and the traditional field of semiotic analyses is expanded accordingly.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.10Plastic semiotics: From visuality to all the senses2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Gintautė Žemaitytėgintaute.zemaityte@vda.ltThe article’s aim is to present plastic semiotics, one of the most recent branches of the Greimassian School. In his <em>Structural Semantics: An Attempt at a Method</em> (1966) Algirdas Julius Greimas stated that sensorial perception was the dimension in which the grasping of meaning takes place, but explicit principles of the analysis of this nonlinguistic dimension were published only years later, in his article “Figurative semiotics and plastic semiotics” (1984). Since then, plastic semiotics has been leading independent existence, focused on the effects of sense generated by the form and the substance of expression. Plastic analysis has turned out to be a fruitful approach not only in the field of visual studies, but also in the research into other sensorial expressions.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.11Four ways of triadic ‘sign-ness’ on two semiotic squares2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Herman Tamminentamminen@ut.ee<p>The article deals with semiosis and its dimensions as a theoretical construct to show some elementary differences between spheres of semiotic activity. In essence, one sign will be dissected into four categories of existence to show it may have different relations depending on the dimension it happens to be in. The general framework is that of human consciousness and its two distinct states: awake cognition and asleep dreaming with emphasis on the latter. From our point of view, the concepts of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ have two layers: the manifest form and the latent function, the seen and the unseen. These are used as parallels to support the central thesis of this article that human cognition has dreaming as its countepart.</p><p>The main theoretical frame is drawn from the work of Greimas and Courtés with emphasis on the semiotic square. The concept of the sign is taken from Peirce, whereas ‘sign-ness’ is adopted from Pyatigorskij. By projecting the triadic sign onto the semiotic square and excluding the concept ‘sign system’ along with the syntactic aspect, the basic fourfold dimension of the sign as such will be brought to view based on the distinct sign-relations in each given dimension. In order to double the square, semiosis will be endowed with features of ‘being-able’, thus affording the initial expression of dominant modalities serving as basis for the structure(s) of the elementary function and mechanism in each of the four dimensions. This will also enable bringing into view some elementary restrictions on semiosis in each dimension. Lastly, some new terms are suggested in accordance with what has been presented.</p>2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.12Interpreting “The Snow Queen”: A comparison of two semantic universes2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Tatjana Pilipovecatatjana.pilipovec@gmail.comThe article compares the famous fairy tale “The Snow Queen” by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen with a Soviet play of the same title by Evgenij Schwartz. Schwartz changed the original ideas and narrative structure of Andersen’s complex and religious text in order to make the play more attractive, spectacular and relatable for Soviet viewers. With the help of A. J. Greimas’ actantial model and semiotic square, the article tries to distinguish and analyse the discursive transformations of the source text in the process of adaptation.2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studieshttp://sss.ut.ee/index.php/sss/article/view/SSS.2017.45.1-2.13Umberto Eco and John Deely: What they shared2017-07-05T17:13:57+03:00Kalevi Kullkalevi.kull@ut.eeUmberto Eco and John Deely: What they shared2017-07-05T00:00:00+03:00Copyright (c) 2017 Sign Systems Studies